Volkswagen will offer generous compensation packages to the roughly 600,000 US owners of diesel vehicles whose emissions are over the legal limit, the head of its claims fund told a German paper.
It has still not decided whether car owners will be offered cash, car buy-backs, repairs or replacements, Kenneth Feinberg told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Feinberg previously headed the compensation funds for the September 11, 2001 attacks, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill and General Motors' ignition switch crashes.
On Friday, Volkswagen postponed the publication of its 2015 results and delayed its annual shareholders' meeting as it struggles to put an exact price on its emissions scandal.
More than four months after the scandal broke in the US, Europe's leading car maker has still not won approval for a fix for any of the vehicles. Last week it named a new head of its US legal department to help resolve the case.
Uncertainty about the financial impact of the scandal on VW's accounts has increased since the start of the year, sending its shares 26% lower.
However, Norway's $850 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, said it would remain invested in Volkswagen, in which it holds 1.2%.
"VW is an important company for Germany, Europe and the world. That's why we will keep our stake as long as the fund and the company exist," the fund's CEO Yngve Slyngstad said.
But he added that since 2008 the fund has criticised the ownership structure at Volkswagen, where the Porsche and Piech families hold 31.5% of the capital but control 50.7 percent of voting rights.
US regulators last month rejected VW's original plan to fix 2.0 litre diesel cars equipped with software designed to conceal the cars' true emissions, raising concerns that VW may have to carry out a larger number of costly buy-backs.
VW has already promised goodwill packages worth $1,000 to tens of thousands of VW owners in the US, and the European Commission and European lawmakers have urged it to consider making a similar offer to owners in Europe.
The group set aside €6.7 billion in the third quarter of 2015 to cover repair costs for vehicles worldwide. Analysts said this might need to be topped up by another €2-3 billion.
